events/2025-06-11-hwc-europe
Homebrew Website Club Europe/London was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-06-11.
- Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-06-11-hwc-europe
Homebrew Website Club Europe/London
June 11, 2025
Participants
Joe Crawford
Reilly Spitzfaden
Mike Kupietz
Paul Watson
mandaris
Al Abut
zacharykai
Angelo Gladding
gRegor Morrill
Fractalkitty
benji
Nick Simson- ... add yourself! inside Template:braces if you have a chat name
Notes
- Question of the day: "What two different html tags are your favorite?"
- Mike Kupietz details > summary or html > body
- Reilly Spitzfaden article > section
- Paul Watson body > main
- mandaris figure > figcaption and blockquote > footer (Example: https://mandarismoore.com/2025/04/28/looks-like-the-mcrib-is.html)
- Al Abut: dl > dt > dd
- zacharykai details > summary
Thomas Vander Wal I really like the DL stace of markup, but also blockquote with cite
- gRegor Morrill: blink and marquee. or if we're talking politics, del
- Nick Simson: small and (even though that's not a tag.)
RIP
- Brian Wilson (joe's Beach Boys mix: Beachboysessence
- Sly Stone (No webpage, but somewhere, there's a midget standing tall, and a giant beside him about to fall (lyrics from Stand)
- Strong recommendation for Questlove's recent documentary Sly Lives!
Al's Updates
- Al Abut has still been putting up simple single use pages for bikepacking
- Latest is a training log from the first ride into the mountains: http://alabut.com/projects/bikepacking/ridelog1/
- The first was last week and an overview of the route: https://alabut.com/projects/bikepacking/
- Both are based on my skeleton starter template: http://alabut.com/projects/halfnaked/
- I've also been working on my first blog post in a year but wow is it hard to get the rust off of the writing skills. I found I still have the ear for what I want to put out, it's just taking longer to hammer a draft into a final polished edit.
- My recent favorite tags are <picture> and <source> for making responsive images, as I demo and document here: https://alabut.com/drafts/
- My old school favorite html tags are a description list: dl> <dt> <dt>
Also
- Zachary has audio again yah!
- Speaking of definition lists as code for a script: I have a small text to definition list tool on the lab: https://lab.artlung.com/quote-to-dl/
ChatGPT, accuracy, etc
https://chatgpt.com/share/6849c796-3278-800a-b483-5b20b31a8566
- Ana Tudor recently shared a solid article about the shortcomings of ChatGPT for coding solutions: https://frontendmasters.com/blog/chatgpt-and-old-and-broken-code/
- There's a longer published paper by Apple on the limits of the reasoning abilities of LLM's: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking
- Artificial Incompetence (AI) will replace human incompetence by 2029
- Baldur Bjarnason's recent piece:
- https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/a-knockout-blow-for-llms
- What is your policy or preference for using A.I. tools in your writing?
- Al Abut has a "anything except the writing itself" approach, where the chatbot can help with information or feedback, but don't ever write any prose whatsoever.
- mandaris says he avoids A.I. because of the risks of deskilling:
- https://medium.com/@nurtured_glaucous_whale_476/ais-impact-on-de-skilling-and-upskilling-in-the-workforce-a-double-edged-sword-02fa0b5f4858
- https://laetitiaatwork.substack.com/p/ais-battle-of-the-skills-upskilling
- https://crowston.syr.edu/sites/crowston.syr.edu/files/GAI_and_skills.pdf
- Chicago Sun-Times confirms AI was used to create reading list of books that donβt exist
- One of the reasons to be wary of using A.I. tool replace or even aid creativity is that the tired cliche aesthetic of the look of A.I. generated visuals and writing:
- https://www.fastcompany.com/91001568/one-year-in-the-gen-ai-aesthetic-is-already-a-tired-trope
- Showed examples of physical posters that have the same generic look
- https://reillyspitzfaden.com/ai-policy/
- Nice! Consider adding to large_language_model#IndieWeb_Examples if you'd like
- GenAI is Our Polyester: https://culture.ghost.io/genai-is-our-polyester/
- Making things "rough" can also have practical benefits in quickly expressing authenticity and handcrafted.
Art!
- Procedural art for what was once called generative art
- "vibe code" is that coding?
- access to ai enshittification
- how to change the verbs?
- Produce vs create as verb? (making distinction as to where the credit goes?) Kupietz uses "generate".
- Question for the group: Are these art? https://michaelkupietz.com/wild-california-studies/ How about these? https://michaelkupietz.com/a-helluva-band/ How about these? https://michaelkupietz.com/gray-ponytails/ These? https://michaelkupietz.com/drooling-ai-assisted-lyrical-illumination/ Who is the author of those images: a machine, or me?
- Answer to Mike Kupietz from Paul Watson (without looking at your URLs):
- Answer to
I'm answering this as someone who graduated with a degree in fine art in 1992, who has been a practicing artist since then:
Yes, they're art. Art is anything presented as art. I say "presented" because not all art is created to be art (a good example being Duchamp's Urinal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) ).
One problem with the term "art" is that, in colloquial English, it has underlying connotations of quality, but I think those connotations are misleading.
A 3-year-old child's drawing is as much art as <insert painting by famous renaissance artist here>. Art is a purpose, not a label of quality.
To answer "who is the author of those images" I'd again refer to Duchamp's Urinal - is Duchamp the _creator_ of the Urinal (no, he found it - it's Found Object art), but he is the artist who presented it as art.
Hope that helps. Thanks for the reply Paul Watson! A lot started with Urinal (and LHOOQ)... when I was in electronic music (before the current Techno age, when it was more in the classical realm) Duchamp was where the History Of Electronic Music classes started, before proceeding to music concrΓ©te (yes, the accent is wrong, I can't find the right one) and Pierre Schaeffer. Anyway, I was more interested in a response, not in terms of broad questions of what is art (about which I can pontificate for hours and you and I would probably agree on a lot of points), but whether those people who seem to think AI text-to-image outputs "all look similar" or are "enshittifying" art, or that it's the AI doing the creative work and not the prompt author, find those specific galleries to have any human artistic merit or not, on a more visceral, personal, than philosophical level. I'm not trying to inquire what art is, so much as where people's personal boundaries are.
- There's a generational difference in how most people use ai: https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/openai-ceo-sam-altman-says-163151359.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAIGkTX03CZbHNHhSF00SbcW25zP1-Cvuj3dgYLjzuaR-k1-zPkHjAcr3kAXMOeLr622EyX-M1_UOJ26nKTYkaVpJzfph-59-D1WB7ZqnxSrVVbfi2jPcaLNuu5uU-Oq-prpOKTRXv2B4ODalaz6eDieTTkmT14L0Fms5VjwWrrkt
I wish I had a chance to comment on how expertise plays into trusting AI content
Micropub!
- Angelo is working on a Micropub client https://ragt.ag/note
- https://ragt.ag/species
- What is micropub? Micropub
- https://micropub.net/
- Micropub is an open web standardand API for creating, editing, and deleting posts on websites
-- https://indiebookclub.biz/ is an example of a Micropub client. Quill is another popular one; one of the first
- Would micropub help with posting from a mobile app or site?
- James' internal version: https://jamesg.blog/create
- Al Abut's been toying with the idea of using a standalone Mastodon account to post to his website so he can use the slick Ivory app while on the go: https://tapbots.com/ivory/
Fractal Kitty Updates
- Fractalkitty has a beautiful visualization of her birdwatching: https://www.streamof.me/
- was able to update while on the road with her phone and iPad
- uses a Python script in Watchdog to look for changes in Numbers
- uses a Bear blog https://bearblog.dev/for more narrative writing: https://toground.link/
- uses the Merlin app from Cornell to track or ID birds: https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
- which pulls from the eBird database: https://ebird.org/home
- slides : https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13rg7Te88F1UxQPkzBSDK3o6zRvnzbZWR3R89wTx_HTE/edit?usp=sharing
Google Sheets as web page source
For Al Abut: https://tinysubversions.com/projects/ runs off of a Google Sheet
- Google_Sheets
- We ran the Twin Cities Mutual Aid with Google Sheets as a backend: https://github.com/Twin-Cities-Mutual-Aid/twin-cities-aid-distribution-locations
RIP Bill Atkinson & Hypercard
- Bill Atkinson passed away recently, an incredibly influential programmer that created HyperCard, among other things
- https://maggieappleton.com/folk-interfaces/ mentioned by Zachary
- Beautiful visualization of the internet: https://diagram.website/
- Fractalkitty is looking for help or advice in using Ghost to publish javascript-based posts
- Her website is accessed by a lot of educators and she doesn't want to break it
- Wonderful sandbox of experiments here: https://www.fractalkitty.com/
Recent Posts of Note
- Ineterview with bento: https://manuelmoreale.com/pb-benji
- IndieWeb Carnival https://www.nicksimson.com/posts/2025-indieweb-carnival-take-two.html
LaTeX in RSS?
- Hello Mathstodon. Any recommendations for RSS feeds when dealing with KATEX?
- For those wondering about MathML, LaTeX and MathJax https://lab.artlung.com/mathml/
- 11ty access raw content in template: https://github.com/11ty/eleventy/discussions/2769
Video in RSS
- ((alabut}} asked about how to add video to posts in a way that shows up in feed readers?
- Fractalkitty had good advice about embedding it from a 3rd party service like Vimeo
- A good compromise: having a teaser post in the feed that says "click through to view the full post with math experiment or video or etc"
- FreshRSS doesn't render LaTeX by defultt but because of plugin architectures, which many self-hosted RSS readers have: https://github.com/aledeg/xExtension-LatexSupport
Angelo
- https://ragt.ag/arroyo-seco/water-reuse-project
- https://ragt.ag/arroyo-seco/water-reuse-project/tree-survey
- https://ragt.ag/arroyo-seco/water-reuse-project/tree-survey/source
elsewise
- Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee
- Creation not just consumption!
- Originally intended web clients to be for both creation and consumption, not just browsing other people's creations.
Hypercard
color: https://farbvelo.elastiq.ch/